Shakespeare's Afterlife in the Royal Collection: Dynasty, Ideology, and National Culture

This unique collection of essays and images explores a series of objects in the Royal Collection as a means of assessing the interrelated histories of the British royal family and the Shakespearean afterlife across four centuries. Between the beginning of the eighteenth century and the late twentieth, Shakespeare became entrenched as the English national poet. Over the same period, the monarchy sought repeatedly to demonstrate its centrality to British nationhood. By way of close analysis of a selection of objects from the Royal Collection, this volume argues that the royal family and the Shakespearean afterlife were far more closely interwoven than has previously been realized. The chapters map the mutual development over time of the relationship between members of the British royal family and Shakespeare, demonstrating the extent to which each has gained sustained value from association with the other and showing how members of the royal family have individually and collectively constructed their identities and performed their roles by way of Shakespearean models. Each chapter is inspired by an object in (or formerly in) the Royal Collection and explores two interconnected questions: what has Shakespeare done for the royal family, and what has the royal family done for Shakespeare? The chapters range across the fields of art, theatre history, literary criticism, literary history, court studies and cultural history, showing how the shared history of Shakespeare and the royal family has been cultivated across media and across disciplines.

Table of Contents:
Sally Barnden, Gordon McMullan, Kate Retford, and Kirsten Tambling: Introduction 1616 1: Gordon McMullan: The 'Disappointment' of Charles I's Shakespeare Second Folio 1700 2: Emrys Jones: Henry V and Early Hanoverian Self-Fashioning 3: Kate Retford: 'A Wild and Unruly Youth' 4: Shormishtha Panja: Moral painting 5: Anna Myers: David Garrick and the President's Chair 6: Rosie Dias: Queen Charlotte and the Royal Narratives of Boydell's Shakespeare Prints 7: Arthur Burns: George III and the other 'Mad King' 8: Essaka Joshua: Disability and Mutable Spectatorship 9: Fiona Ritchie: Fake and Authentic Shakespeare 1800 10: Mark Westgarth: 'Well-Authenticated Blocks' 11: Emma Stuart: Why did George IV own a Shakespeare First Folio? 12: Kate Heard: From Performance to Portfolio 13: Michael Dobson: Hamlet Disowned 14: Lynne Vallone: Princess Victoria and the Cult of Celebrity 15: Eilís Smyth: Shakespeare in the Rubens Room 16: Sally Barnden: Monument and Montage 17: Gail Marshall: Puck and the Prince of Wales 18: Morna O'Neill: Much Ado about Tapestry 19: Vijeta Saini: Disappearances and The Durbar 1900 20: Kirsten Tambling: 'All England in Warm Sepia': Queen Mary and the Church of the Holy Trinity 21: Elizabeth Clark Ashby: Shakespeare in Miniature 22: Eleine Ng-Gagneux: Shashibiya 23: Kathryn Vomero Santos: Cultural (Dis)inheritance and the Decline of Empire in The Prince's Choice Bibliography

About the Author :
Sally Barnden (BA York, MA, and PhD King's College London) is a Lecturer in Literature and Visual Culture at Swansea University, and was a postdoctoral research associate for 'Shakespeare in the Royal Collection.' She is the author of Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance (Cambridge, 2020) and Shakespeare and the Royal Actor (Oxford, 2024). Gordon McMullan (BA Birmingham, MA Kansas, DPhil Oxford) is a Professor of English at King's College London, where he has worked since 1995; prior to that he was a lecturer in English at Newcastle University. He has held fellowships in the United States, Australia, and Denmark; he has published in the fields of Shakespeare, early modern drama, late-life creativity, and environmental humanities; and in 2016 he received the Globe Theatre's Sam Wanamaker Award for his creation and direction of Shakespeare400, London's consortium marking the Shakespeare Quatercentenary. He was Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded project 'Shakespeare in the Royal Collection' (2018-22). Kate Retford (BA, MA, and PhD University of Warwick) is a Professor of History of Art and Head of the School of Historical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on eighteenth-century British art, particularly on gender, portraiture, and the country house. Her research has been funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the AHRC, the British Academy, and, most recently, the Leverhulme Trust. Her recent publications include The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2017) and The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, co-edited with Susanna Avery-Quash (2019). Kirsten Tambling completed her PhD in History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London on the art of Jean-Antoine Watteau and William Hogarth. She was a postdoctoral research associate for 'Shakespeare in the Royal Collection', and subsequently Associate Lecturer on the Curating the Art Museum programme at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has worked in various museums and collections, including the Royal Collection Trust and Watts Gallery, where she was co-curator of the exhibition James Henry Pullen: Inmate, Inventor, Genius (2018). She has published articles on eighteenth-century art, the intersection of art and psychiatry and the history of collections.